Blagdaross

In the answer to one of the letters here.

John Quiggin at CT writes about complaints about English loan words, in this case from Italians, and asks:

“I’d be interested to know whether the influence of English on other European languages goes beyond the importation of a relatively modest number of loan words.”

I answered:

As far as Swedish, yes, both the written and spoken word is riddled with anglicisms, ie phrases that are literal translations of english phrases. It leads to a lot of clumsy and ugly prose.

In the last 20 years or so, people who aren’t confident writers, have started writing compund words as separate words. Presumably, this is because of influence from English. Probably a majority of the younger generations do this. If it will eventually become the rule, which isn’‘t certain, I think it would be a rreal loss for the language, compounds are great.

In most disciplines, doctoral thesises are only written in (generally kind of poor) English, which wasn’t the case thirty years ago, and some are a little worried if present trends continue, the language will be impoverished, and no one will be able to write on certain subjects in Swedish, like African languages where technical writing and other kinds of complex writing is always done in the colonialist language, people don’t have the proper vocabulary in their native tongue. Swedish has of course a long, long way to go before we get the African situation, but the present situation is somewhat problematic.

We are generally spared from these kinds of “Woe! Foreign words pollutevour language” discussion. I wonder how often these people who english speaking media love to report about are representative of elite opinion in their countries as opposed to random cranks.